This is not a rant or an attack on you. I get the point of easyness that Plex and/or Jellyfin offer. I merely would like to explain why i do not need it. I tried both Jellyfin and Plex, but i could not find a huge benefit in using them in our household. Again, not a rant.

I think it's an extra layer on top of things i do not need. I do not need cover art, descriptions or trailers. The smb shares have a folder hierarchy that's very logical and easy to our household so sorting and reindexing is not needed. Kodi (Windows,Linux, Android) keeps track of where i was, but i don't really care that much. Usually i remember what i was watching. File Explorer Pro (paid version) on IOS plays anything. I do not need transcoding, because all the players can play anything i throw at it. My wife and kids know how to use Kodi both on the pcs and the chromecasts.

Mp3's go to a Sonos at the moment. If more mp3 devices would be needed in the future, i'm kinda curious about the CrowdSupply Esparagus systems [1][2]

1: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-media-center 2: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sonocotta/esparagus-audio-brick

If you’re using Kodi, that’s effectively the same thing. Kodi is XBMC. Plex started as a fork of XBMC for OS X. At some point they broke it out into a client/server architecture, which Jellyfin emulated.

If you have one primary client, Kodi is fine. Moving to Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby is more about serving multiple clients while maintaining continuity.

> "Usually i remember what i was watching"

You must not watch that many TV shows or Anime then. Or you have the memory of a savant.

Without an automated system I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking.

> I'd have zero clue where I am in the 100+ series I'm tracking

curious question then - do you remember the content of what you were watching? i totally get that you don't know on what episode you are and i used and love Jellyfin myself, but if you're watching 100+ series "at once" i'm starting to wonder if you even remember the last episode of a show if you rotate so heavily, know what i mean? i barely remember an episode after a week, even if i exclusively watch one show. so either my memory is even worse than i thought, or - you have the memory of a savant ;)

It's not like the plots are complex :D

Mostly it's shows that are on hiatus, due to release cycles being completely random nowadays. Or Anime releasing a second season under a whole different show name.

Also shows I've watched 1-2 episodes of and decided it's worth watching, but not now - as there are a limited number of hours in a day.

Unfortunately i don't have the luxury to watch a lot of shows during the week. Usually the max is around 5 or so. Call me strange, but sometimes i actually like it that i forget what i was watching. Makes me kinda of realise it's still a little luxury leisure. Usually i get happy when i realise there's more show to watch (happened with Foundation). Or i keep ignoring it, because interest was lost over time (happened with Rick and Morty). The kids tend to watch a series back to front and then ignore it completely once they lose interest.

I still have artifacts in my dirs of TOSORT, TODO, and DONE.

I've resorted to manually tracking some non-Plex/Jellyfin shows on Obsidian manually :D

It's super fun to watch some 7 season show on a local streaming service, be on season 3 episode hellifiknow, come back in a week and poof it's gone.

I can't watch anything without subtitles. Plex and Jellyfin support them, in many languages, because of the mumbled dialogues. Yes, I know you burn subs in.

Plus the whole *arr stack.

Usually subtitles are not that hard to find.

Yes but there is something nice about automatic subtitles. Less friction in my life.

Plex makes it much easier for non-technical relatives to interact with my media server. That's my own use-case.

Same here. XBMC/Kodi pointed at NFS has served me and my family well for 15+ years. Every once in a while I check out the alternatives with their custom server software and thick "stacks" and conclude that they don't offer me anything I want to do that I can't do with just shared files.

Rotting, sweaty human hands and fire to name a few.

Pretty sure fire is a risk to servers as well.

Servers make it easier to keep & maintain duplicate data in separate locations, which’ll be unlikely to be affected by the same fire.

Yeah, so does photocopying. The threats you are listing are identical to physical model.

only in that location.

mirror that DB onto a server on the other side of the country, or continent, etc.

Photocopy your documents and send them to another location, same threats same resiliance.

A Dutch website using AI to sell you magic mushrooms catered just for you. And serving you AI harvested blogs, journals and other weblinks just to explain to you how awesome psilocybin is. Even ordering goes via Claude! :)

"Hey Claude. How can i sell drugs on the interwebs!?"

Thanks Gareth.

Machines and processes like the internet barely want things. People and companies who abuse it want things, which has eventually the same effect on other people and companies.

Works surprisingly good indeed. Just get a bowl, stir some eggs, add seasonings of choice and pop it in. Be sure to stop the microwave on time, because the mixture expands a lot.

Sugar ( in all its names and molecular forms ) is evil, because of the vast amount it is in processed food products. Eggs and fat not so much. But they would be if that is the next ‘cheap molecule to make processed food cheap’.

All my windows computers are shutdown when not needed.

My Debian 13 mini 'server' is on 24/7, conserves energy as much as possible (like CPU C8 state), but reboots nightly when required by patches and updates.

My NAS only really on when absolutely necessary, but can be activated using wake-on-lan.

So yes, i restart things quite frequently :)

The moment i read the word Dubai, my empathy levels dropped to zero.

What a wonderful world we live in where we can blame machines and extremely dilluted processes for all things we might do wrong.